deadheaduk

All this thinking about doing some shooting on 8mm film has stirred up a memory from about 25 years ago. Not long after I moved down to London and started working for the AV company Viewplan I was asked to go and operate a job one evening. I remember Stuart, one of the senior technicians and a Geordie as well, asked me if I had ever operated a 16mm projector before.

I said that I hadn’t and he said “Never mind it’s easy” and proceeded to give me a quick lesson on how to thread the film and operate the machine. Armed with the knowledge I had learned in the 5 minute tutorial I set off to South London in a van with a projector, screen and stand.

The venue turned out to be a room above a pub on the Catford one way system. I set up the equipment and gave the DJ a feed to run into his sound desk. The event turned out to be the annual get together of the Eternal Elvis fan club and my job was to run a three reel Elvis film before the disco started.

So I set the first reel going and when it ran out there was a pause while I moved the spool from front to back and threaded the second reel through the projector. When I started it running there was a repeat of the last few minutes as the film was really meant to be shown on a two projector set up that was sync’ed together. A little while later I repeated the procedure with reel 3.

At the end of the film the organiser stood up and made some announcements before the disco started. I was, at this point, standing on a chair next to the projector starting to rewind the film back onto the correct reels. Then I heard the organiser say and finally would you give a big hand to our projectionist Kevin! At which point 100 or so Elvis fans turned round, looked at me and applauded! I had no where to go – so embarrassing!